ontrol of matter by mind. A miracle simply means the swift
control of matter by mind. If you wish to feed the people, you may think
that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible--but you
cannot think it illiberal. If you really want poor children to go to the
seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on
flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely. A holiday, like
Liberalism, only means the liberty of man. A miracle only means the
liberty of God. You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you
cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea. The Catholic
Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom.
Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific
materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the
Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe.
And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians."

This, as I say, is the lightest and most evident case. The assumption
that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin to liberality or
reform is literally the opposite of the truth. If a man cannot believe
in miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly
liberal, but he is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much
better things. But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the
more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the
soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance.
Sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the
ablest men. For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with a hearty
old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort
of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely
unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own
favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. Just in the
same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness,
forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and
heroic selfishness. How can it be noble to wish to make one's life
infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal? No, if it is
desirable that man should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom,
then miracles are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards
whether they are possible.

But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion
that the "liberalising" of religion in